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Installation

You can install Vault Assistant three ways: from npm, as a packaged desktop app, or straight from the source tree. All of them run on macOS and Linux. There is no Windows build yet.

Whichever route you pick, the AI engine needs credentials at runtime: either sign in with the claude CLI or put an ANTHROPIC_API_KEY in a .env file. See System prerequisites for the full dependency list.

Install the published package globally:

npm install -g @jairik/vault-assistant

Then start it:

vault-assistant          # web interface
vault-assistant --tui    # terminal interface

The server prints its address, http://localhost:5173 by default. It does not open a browser for you, so paste the URL into one yourself. To use a different port, set PORT in a .env file.

One caveat: the vault-assistant command is a Bash wrapper around the project's run.sh, so you still need Bun 1.3 or newer on your PATH. The npm package gives you a convenient command; Bun does the actual work.

Option 2: desktop app​

Grab a package from the latest GitHub release. Current formats are .deb and .rpm for Linux; macOS packages (.dmg for Apple Silicon and Intel) build in CI but have not shipped in a published release yet, so check the releases page for the current list.

The desktop app bundles its own Bun runtime as a sidecar, so this is the only install path that works without Bun on your system. You still need Claude Code credentials or an API key for generation. See Desktop app for how the shell works.

Option 3: from source​

Clone the repo and run the startup script:

git clone https://github.com/Jairik/vault-assistant.git
cd vault-assistant
./run.sh

./run.sh installs dependencies and starts the dev server, the same as running bun install && bun run dev. Add --tui to start the terminal interface instead. If you want the global vault-assistant command from a clone, run npm install -g . (or bun install -g .) from the repo root.

To build the desktop app from source you also need a Rust toolchain and a few system libraries; the list lives in System prerequisites. Then:

bun run desktop        # run the desktop shell in dev mode
bun run desktop:build  # produce an installable package

Next steps​

Vault Assistant has three frontends that share one backend: the web interface (the default), the desktop app, and the terminal interface. Pick whichever fits how you work.